People sometimes ask me: “Do you really believe that nothing could be worse than the Pashinyan regime? What about this candidate, who has committed serious mistakes in the past? Or that one, with a pronounced geopolitical agenda?”
The answer is simple: there is no perfect candidate and no perfect political force.
Yet there is one respect in which the ruling Civil Contract party differs from the other seventeen participants in the elections—including its own satellites and political allies. No one but Nikol Pashinyan has displayed the audacity to declare that replacing the Catholicos of All Armenians is a political objective.
We have all seen what Pashinyan has done to the Armenian Church over the past year. In pursuit of his personal obsessions, unfounded ambitions, and reckless designs, he has resorted to the lowest methods, unlawfully mobilizing a repressive apparatus that serves him with unquestioning loyalty.
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I am one hundred percent certain that no future prime minister or president will permit such a desecration. Nor do the other seventeen candidates suffer from the same pathologies that afflict Pashinyan. These are rare and deeply disturbing defects.
I cannot speak with the same certainty about everything else. But I do have hopes.
I hope that the unlawful criminal prosecutions of clergymen, politicians, activists, and bloggers will cease after a change of government—and, more importantly, that no new politically motivated abuses of this kind will take place.
I hope that no public figure will again use expressions such as “crush them,” “bring them to their knees,” or “turn them into bums” in political speeches and public discourse.
You may ask: what about security? What about the economy? What about the Crossroads of Peace initiative? What about Russia? What about the European Union?
None of these challenges has an easy solution.
But if the atmosphere of hatred and hostility fostered by the current authorities is removed; if the culture of informing on one another is brought to an end; if people stop attacking each other like rabid dogs simply because they hold different views, then political forces—first and foremost in parliament—together with the expert community and society at large, will be able to find at least workable solutions. Brilliant answers that satisfy everyone are, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.
The immediate priority, however, is to restore internal solidarity and social cohesion.
That is impossible under Pashinyan’s rule.
Hatred is the fuel that sustains his power.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
